Though I suppose you could argue there would be less incentive and competition and drive to innovate if that were the case. Still interesting to wonder about.
Here in Germany we owe most of our modern institutions (one of the first healthcare systems, the national education system) to Prussia, in France the Napoleonic code was one of the most important reforms in history, and most of that nation-building was driven by militaristic nation-state competition. The Cold War is another example of course. He argues that war is the primary thing that pushes states to improve the welfare of their populations and it enables larger organization. Israel is probably another good example of a country whose innovation is effectively driven by survival.
I think you can make a decent case that the sort of post-Soviet stagnation, lack of reform or interest in taking care of pressing domestic issues, over-financialization etc.. was driven largely by being stuck in a unipolar system without competition.
[1]https://www.visualcapitalist.com/map-true-size-of-africa/
The accelerating technological dynamic that put Europe ahead of everyone else along the Silk Road had a different dynamic. One of whose key ingredients was the lack of any central authority who could suppress discoveries and lines of research for whatever political or religious reasons. And once that turned into a runaway train of progress, well, everyone was backwards compared to them!
Except in telecommunications, surgery, and metallurgy, subsaharan Africa wasn't ahead of Europe, China, and India even before the early modern ramp-up in the slave trade, but it wasn't nearly as far off as you'd extrapolate from looking at the ruins after 500 years of enslavement and colonialism.
Powerful African states like the Ashanti empire, Dahomey and Kanem Bornu empire grew and based much of their economy on the wealth of the slave trade, benefiting at the expense of their weaker neighbors whom they "exported", and collapsed only after the slave trade was over, in part because of the loss of that trade revenue. In general, the conquest and colonization (beyond trade posts) of sub-Saharan Africa does not overlap at all with the years of trans-Atlantic slave trade, the collapse of pretty much all the African empires and kingdoms came starting from 1880 after the slave trade had ended.
And of course there are earlier great African empires like Mali and Songhai and Kush, but again their collapse had nothing to do with "the onslaught of the slave trade". Arguably the causality is the other way around - the peoples whose empires collapsed due to attacks by neighbours or internal fighting became the victims of the slave trade afterwards, benefiting the economy of their victorious neighboring African empires/kingdoms who then kept raiding the less unified areas for slaves.
In 2019, 1.4 million US adults tried to kill themselves. 47,511 died. Why do so many survive? It is because information about effective ways to commit suicide exist but is not well disseminated. Men have a fraction of the suicide attempts of women, and yet commit suicide at several times the rate. Suicide rates are also unevenly distributed across races. By my understanding, the primary reason for these differences is that men and specific races are more likely to pick an effective suicide method.
Teenagers are particularly likely to be suicidal and grow out of it. As the parent of such a teenager, I'm perfectly OK with not disseminating knowledge about the most effective ways that she could try to kill herself with common household items.
(I'm also happy to disseminate the knowledge that the method you should never use is drinking anti-freeze. You will not kill yourself. You will destroy your liver and kidneys, and will make your life suck a whole lot more than it does already.)
I believe that will happen before we reach Type 2 at the Kardashev scale.
The question now is how do we reach Type 1 asap (hopefully within the next 50 years)
Kardashev is a measurement of energy access/use. So we build lots of new power plants. Everyone starts driving giant vehicles. That should get our energy consumption up enough for Type 1. It's an old scale that doesn't acknowledge that a very advanced civilization may decide not to use all the energy it theoretically could.
That sounds like optimizing for KPI to me, in which case we'll be doing it wrong.
The only way to arrive there naturally is to have more efficient ways of generating energy (fusion, renewable, etc).
> ... advanced civilization may decide not to use all the energy it theoretically could
Energy generation & consumption (which are both tied to future prices, etc) always appear to be a game-theoretical optimization at geopolitcal and social-economical scales. Even in the current days (eg gazprom, nato, etc.)
When we reach Type 1, we would have greatly reduced the cost of energy (resource-cost and enviromental-impact wise) and global economy will become more intervined and convoluted. The social-cultural implication would be fascinating too. Many existing status quos will crumble as the cost-to-transform skyrockets [1]. (Also: eg perhaps that's when crypto finally makes sense and become stable?)